The most under-discussed aspect of the NSA story has long been its
international scope. That all changed this week as both Germany and
France
exploded with anger over new revelations about pervasive NSA
surveillance on their population and democratically elected leaders.

As was true for Brazil previously, reports about
surveillance aimed at leaders are receiving most of the media attention,
but what really originally drove the story there were revelations that
the NSA is
bulk-spying on millions and millions of
innocent citizens in
all of those nations. The favorite cry of US government apologists
--everyone spies! - falls impotent in the face of this sort of
ubiquitous, suspicionless spying that is the sole province of the US and
its four English-speaking surveillance allies (the UK, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand).

There are three points worth making about these latest
developments.

First, note how leaders such as Chancellor Angela
Merkel reacted with basic indifference when it was revealed months ago
that the NSA was bulk-spying on all German citizens, but suddenly
found her indignation only when it turned out that she personally was
also targeted. That reaction gives potent insight into the true
mindset of many western leaders.

Second, all of these governments keep saying how
newsworthy these revelations are, how profound are the violations they
expose, how happy they are to learn of all this, how devoted they are
to reform. If that's true, why are they allowing the person who
enabled all these disclosures - Edward Snowden - to be targeted for
persecution by the US government for the "crime" of blowing the
whistle on all of this?

If the German and French governments - and the German
and French people - are so pleased to learn of how their privacy is
being systematically assaulted by a foreign power over which they exert
no influence, shouldn't they be offering asylum to the person who
exposed it all, rather than ignoring or rejecting his pleas to have his
basic political rights protected, and thus leaving him vulnerable to
being imprisoned for decades by the US government?

Aside from the treaty obligations these nations have
to protect the basic political rights of human beings from persecution,
how can they simultaneously express outrage over these exposed invasions
while turning their back on the person who risked his liberty and even
life to bring them to light?

Third, is there any doubt at all that the US
government repeatedly tried to mislead the world when insisting that
this system of suspicionless surveillance was motivated by an attempt
to protect Americans from The Terrorists™? Our reporting has revealed
spying on
conferences designed to negotiate economic agreements, the
Organization of American States,
oil companies, ministries that
oversee mines and energy resources, the democratically elected
leaders of allied states, and entire populations in those states.

Speaking of an inability to maintain claims with a
straight face, how are American and British officials, in light of their
conduct in all of this, going to maintain the pretense that they are
defenders of press freedoms and are in a position to lecture and condemn
others for violations? In what might be the most explicit hostility to
such freedoms yet - as well as the most unmistakable evidence of rampant
panic - the NSA's director, General Keith Alexander,
actually demanded Thursday that the reporting being done by
newspapers around the world on this secret surveillance system be halted
(Techdirt
has the full video here):

The head of the embattled National Security Agency, Gen Keith
Alexander, is accusing journalists of "selling" his agency's documents
and is calling for an end to the steady stream of public disclosures
of secrets snatched by former contractor Edward Snowden.

"I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these
documents, the 50,000 - whatever they have and are selling them and
giving them out as if these - you know it just doesn't make sense,"
Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed
With Science" blog.

"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don't know how to do
that. That's more of the courts and the policy-makers but, from my
perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director
declared. [My italics]

There are 25,000 employees of the NSA (and many tens
of thousands more who work for private contracts assigned to the
agency). Maybe one of them can tell The General about
this thing called "the first amendment".

I'd love to know what ways, specifically, General
Alexander has in mind for empowering the US government to "come up with
a way of stopping" the journalism on this story. Whatever ways those
might be, they are deeply hostile to the US constitution - obviously.
What kind of person wants the government to forcibly shut down reporting
by the press?

Whatever kind of person that is, he is not someone to
be trusted in instituting and developing a massive bulk-spying system
that operates in the dark. For that matter, nobody is.